


Soft Reboot

by DeadlyRobots



Category: Red Dwarf (UK TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Episode: s04e04 White Hole, Gen, Parallel Universes, Post-Episode S04E04 White Hole, Season/Series 04, Time Travel, White Hole, holograms, in which a plot hole nobody cares about is plugged by an idiot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:08:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23907457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeadlyRobots/pseuds/DeadlyRobots
Summary: The White Hole wasn't the problem. The White Hole was a distraction. Hundreds of thousands of years later, the last surviving crewmember of the JMC mining ship Red Dwarf just might have figured out how to avert disaster.
Relationships: Dave Lister/Arnold Rimmer
Comments: 4
Kudos: 23





	Soft Reboot

**Author's Note:**

> This one took a little longer to write than my last three efforts, mostly because Series IV doesn't have quite as much wiggle room as the first three. But I've always been fascinated by a particularly sizable plot hole in "White Hole", and I decided I'd see if I could fit a universe in it.
> 
> Forewarning: This one is perhaps a little darker than my previous offerings. I hope you enjoy it regardless.

Plugging up the White Hole hadn’t been enough. He could see that now.

He’d had time to think about it - hundreds of thousands of years, by that point - but this was a monkeys-with-typewriters situation, and he was the monkey. No, not a monkey; a broken clock, its cogs and coils unspooled, spiraling out into the cold, endless expanse of space.

In his entire life, he reckoned, he would be right about this, and only this.

He sighed to nobody in particular, expelling air that didn’t exist into a void that couldn’t acknowledge his existence. There was nothing. There had been nothing for quite some time now, and he had been alone for considerably longer than he reckoned his hardware had been designed for, even before the accident.

Space was not, in fact, endless. You just reached a point where you ran out of stars to count.

Time loses its meaning when you have nothing to measure it by but your own internal functions. He couldn’t even hear himself humming anymore - he’d taken great comfort in that sound, way back when. It meant that, no matter how little of him there was left, there was _something_.

Sound cannot travel in the vacuum of space. He’d read that on a poster for an impossibly old movie a very long time ago now, so long ago he could barely remember the name. He’d learned about how most humans only used 10% of their brains the same way, and had delighted in being able to weaponize that fact as an insult. He’d later learned that it wasn’t true at all, that it was just nonsense pseudo-science, and began to wonder if the facts he’d gleaned from other film marketing materials was similarly inaccurate.

What if you _could_ believe a man can fly? What if the first casualty of war was not, in fact, innocence?

What if, in space, they _could_ hear you scream?

Turns out that one, at the very least, was accurate. Not that there was anyone left to hear him, of course. But _he_ couldn’t. He’d checked.

He remembered how it had felt when he’d first come online. It was scary at first. He could feel his limbs and extremities, but they didn’t feel… well, _right_. They felt like he was _remembering_ what it felt like to curl his fingers, what the sensation of lifting his legs was like, rather than experiencing it in the moment.

Echoes of life.

He hadn’t asked for it. It was, it turned out, a gift from a friend he never got to say goodbye to.

And now there was no one left to ask it to stop.

Holograms didn’t go insane. It was an odd side-effect of the simulation process. You could leave a hologram in isolation for hundreds of years, and they’d still retain more or less the same personality they had by the end of it. There’d been experiments back on Earth, simulations run at high-speed to determine the effects of long-term isolation beyond the normal human lifespan. They’d reached 2,500 years before the experiments were halted on ethical grounds (the objection being that it was considered immoral to force holograms to live inside of a machine sponsored by Red Bull).

He’d long since passed the length of those experiments, and he still had complete control of his faculties.

He wasn’t even granted the simple pleasure of losing his mind during this ordeal.

Of course, it had given him time to think. About life. About Earth. About _Red Dwarf_. About the accident, about what followed, about _Starbug_ , about the life he’d led, and what came next.

The accident, he’d reasoned, was unavoidable. Even with the amount of time he’d had, he didn’t think he could possibly come up with a solution that didn’t involve wiping out the crew. It was beyond him.

But, ah, the White Hole. _That_ was when it had all fallen apart.

He had absolutely no idea whether the White Hole had ever actually existed, mind, but you could rebuild an image of something by the hole it leaves in the universe, and he’d had countless lifetimes to assess the available information.

He had a pretty firm idea of what had happened.

Kryten had experimented with restoring Holly’s I.Q. at the expense of her lifespan. This had backfired massively, resulting in Holly powering down permanently. Around that time, he believed they’d encountered a White Hole - a theoretical space-time anomaly that, counter to its opposing namesake, ejected time _out_ into the Universe rather than swallowing it whole.

He further mused that they had somehow successfully closed up the Hole, though he wasn’t sure how. As a result, all of the time the White Hole had fed into the Universe had been unmade, and the Hole’s influence was negated.

But all that did was remove time from the Universe. It didn’t prevent Kryten from experimenting with Holly.

Time, then, as he experienced it, had more or less continued uninterrupted, but without the massive inconvenience of encountering a swirling white vortex vomiting minutes into space. The experiment with Holly had still failed, and the ship had still been left with minimal emergency power. They’d stayed aboard _Red Dwarf_ for almost two months trying to restore Holly before a failure of life support forced them into abandoning ship, loading as many supplies as they could into _Starbug_. They’d spent the better part of a decade scavenging parts from derelicts, trading with GELF, and just barely surviving.

They’d met a brilliant scientific mind, one that had been able to upgrade the Light Bee to Hard Light. They’d encountered a rip in the fabric of reality that allowed them the briefest of encounters with a parallel universe - one where Navigations Officer Kristine Kochanki had survived the accident instead of Lister.

He’d had a very brief glimpse into his future.

They had, eventually, found a computer core with an AI boasting an I.Q. of 8,400. After ten years of desperate, panicked living, they thought they’d found their ticket home. Yes, it would be a shame to lose Holly, but to them, Holly had already been dead for the better part of a decade. At least this way they could return to _Red Dwarf_ and stretch their legs.

 _Red Dwarf_ wasn’t there when they reached its last known coordinates.

What _was_ there, in its place, was a scattered field of debris - pieces of JMC-branded equipment and pieces of shoddily-painted red hull. Based on the size of the debris field and the rate of drift, Kryten’s best guess placed the destruction of _Red Dwarf_ at six-to-eight months prior to their arrival.

They were half a year too late.

They’d let Holly down.

 _We owed her better,_ he thought as he began pulling cable out of his Light Bee. _I owed her better._

~*~

The Cat was the first to go, and the only one to leave.

He’d never handled leaving _Red Dwarf_ well. The thought of all of those suits sitting, gathering dust, never again getting to grace his beautiful body or accentuate the curve of his magnificent ass had been distressing enough. Seeing the ship destroyed, knowing those outfits were gone, had pushed him too far.

He’d been wearing black almost exclusively for two months when they encountered the ships. Five ships traveling in formation. A fleet, surrounding an Ark.

 _The_ Ark.

The cat people had long ago made coollness a sin, and with no way to sin and nothing to turn to, the Cat turned to his faith. He parted ways with the _Starbug_ crew and rejoined his people. They never encountered him again.

One down.

The first thing Kryten had done after they’d found _Red Dwarf_ destroyed was to set up the AI aboard _Starbug_. If it couldn’t operate a mining ship, a ship-to-surface vessel would have to do. The AI didn’t have a name, but they’d Christened him Bertie. It was a joke Lister found hilarious, one Kryten enjoyed because it made Mr. Lister laugh so, and one Rimmer utterly failed to comprehend.

Kryten had spent the better part of a year, on and off, installing a hologrammatic projection system aboard _Starbug_. His reasoning was this: Rimmer’s Light Bee wouldn’t last forever. Nothing did. If it died, there should be some kind of backup to take over the task of projecting him. Rimmer was annoying, ill-tempered, bigoted, selfish, stupid and had a Godzilla-sized Napoleon complex, but he had been brought back to keep Lister sane.

Kryten helped to preserve Rimmer, because doing so helped to preserve Lister.

Getting the projection system up and running was the last thing Kryten did. He’d suspected for some time that he was nearing the end of his life - his battery was holding less and less of a charge, until suddenly, one day, it stopped holding a charge at all.

Kryten came to a stop, frozen in position, screwing in the last screw of the last fixture of the last piece of the projection system.

It was just Rimmer, Lister and Bertie left.

That would change very, very suddenly.

Rogue Simulants had been tracking the ship for a while, and Kryten had been doing a fairly competent job of masking _Starbug_ ’s exhaust. He’d been doing this without telling Rimmer and Lister - he didn’t want to cause any panic.

Now he was gone, and _Starbug_ was vulnerable.

It was 3 o’clock in the morning when two gunshots were fired in Lister’s quarters.

The second had, astoundingly, been fired by Rimmer, holding the Bazookoid in disbelief as the Simulant collapsed lifelessly onto the floor.

The first had been fired by the Simulant.

The last human had been killed in his sleep.

~*~

Rimmer spent the next few days trying, and failing, to go to pieces.

He didn’t know what to do.

He didn’t know if there was anything _to_ do.

And worst of all, he didn’t much care.

His mind remained intact. Unbroken. Typical. He wasn’t even allowed the simple comfort of maddening grief.

It was early evening on the fifth day of solitude that Rimmer’d had an epiphany.

They hadn’t been able to take much when they’d first left _Red Dwarf_ over a decade ago, but one of the things they’d taken, just in case, was the cache of hologrammatic projection discs.

Rimmer pulled out disc after disc, desperately seeking for the right one. Eventually, when he found it, he shouted. He couldn’t help it, an audible yelp of excitement and joy left his mouth.

Kryten had set up the backup hologrammatic projection system to extend Rimmer’s life. Instead, it would be extending Lister’s.

Even better, with one of them on the internal projector and the other on the Light Bee, _Starbug_ would be able to maintain two holograms simultaneously. It was a brilliant, foolproof plan.

It was ruined only by the unfortunate discovery that the internal projector, the one Kryten had spent weeks painstakingly installing in every room on every level of _Starbug_ , didn’t actually work.

Rimmer was heartbroken.

Bertie had run every kind of diagnostic on the equipment he could, and he’d found zero faults. Not one. It was connected to the internal computer system, it was drawing power. By rights, it should’ve been working.

But it wasn’t.

Rimmer was alone. He was destined to be alone forever.

There was nothing he could do to bring Lister back.

Well.

Almost nothing.

~*~

Rimmer had never been one for speeches, and his idea of a fond farewell boiled down to saying “Well, bye.” Nevertheless, he’d given it the old college try.

Lister found himself running his finger along the H on his forehead as he listened to Rimmer explain why he’d done it. How he knew, deep down, his job had been to keep Lister sane. How he didn’t think he’d been particularly good at it. How, deep down, he knew he had the spirit of a noble something-or-other trapped in the body of a cowardly wossname.

Rimmer said this was probably the first truly noble thing he’d done in his entire life.

And then the recording had stopped.

And Lister was alone. Just him and Bertie.

He wiped a hologrammatic tear from his face, and tried to figure out what to do next.

If he just had time.

~*~

Lister wasn’t stupid.

He’d spent most of his life being told he was stupid, and he’d spent most of his life believing it.

But he knew better now.

Everything that had happened to him - dying, coming back as a hologram, finding an Ouroboros micro-battery that was compatible with his Light Bee, discovering the Diamond Light projection system that allowed him to manipulate light itself - had all led him here.

With the length and breadth of his history behind him, he knew exactly what he needed to do.

And he’d had the time to figure out how to do it.

As he rewired his own Light Bee, he briefly wondered if he was the only artificial lifeform at this end of the timeline doing what he was about to do.

He smiled. Probably not. Even out here, he wasn’t alone. He was never alone. Not really.

He closed the cap on his Light Bee, did the calculations in his head, and shifted into Diamond Light.

Manipulating light is tricky. Light is, of course, a hard-coded element of the universe. It’s one of the few fundamentals of physics with its own speed limit. There were rules.

Lister smiled, imagining Rimmer writing him up for violating the laws of physics.

His body began to project outward, not into space, but bending into reality itself. Into time. Into the past.

 _His_ past.

Onto _Red Dwarf_ , such a long time ago.

~*~

Kryten can’t remember where he was going.

Just a moment ago he’d been walking with purpose. He was, as he recalled, even a little excited.

Then he thought he’d heard… was it Mr. Lister’s voice? He couldn’t remember.

Now he can’t remember not remembering.

He stands in the corridor leading to _Red Dwarf_ ’s waste disposal, gently baffled as to what he was doing there.

It’s things like these that can have a Mechanoid worried they might have Droid Rot.

Kryten sighs, turns on his heel, and walks in the opposite direction. If he can’t remember where he was going, maybe that’s a sign he’s been putting off exploring _Red Dwarf_ ’s R&D department for too long.

The universe, insofar as it is capable of moving, spins on.


End file.
